Before leaving Leipzig Gossner quietly passed into
the Protestant Church, and partook of the Lord's Supper. The immediate
reason seems to have been that, while his zeal to preach would not
suffer him to remain inactive, his pastorate in the Romish Church was
evidently at an end. There was no additional inward light, only an
additional outward necessity. So long back as 1804, this necessity had
placed the thought before his mind. The persecution of Augsburg
suggested it very forcibly. In his diary he wrote, at the close of that
year:—"Neither the spirit of the times nor the philosophy of the day can
redeem men from their sins; neither do the ruling superstition nor the
mechanism of its popular worship and the daily priesthood redeem men
from their sins; one can see that with both eyes. What is to be done?
This is a question I am, not yet ready to answer. Neither Borne nor
his holiness the Pope frees us, but only empty the purse by their
dispensations and screw down upon us countless forms and bring us under
a yoke which we can no longer bear." If, on the one hand, his mind was
not yet made up, on the other hand, it is plain that the question with
him was more one of personal liberty than of ecclesiastical
principle—that there was nothing in the idea of the Protestant Church
with which he was at variance, and that he did not join it before simply
because the pressure from without had not culminated. From that time the
unsolved question was frequently brought up to him. From Dirlewang, he
turned once to Schoner in Nuremberg, to ask his advice. "Remain where
you are," he said, in the true spirit of the time; "the Lutheran devil
is every whit as black as the Romish." Again, in 1811, he made a journey
to Basle for this special object; but when there it seemed as if the
stones burned under his feet, as if an inward voice warned him back, as
if it was God's will that he should still preach the gospel in the
Church where God had found him. Had he not to go daily through a dead
service? But Sailer had taught him to spiritualise it; and beneath every
form to see the pure stream of the water of life. Were there no
traditions that made void the cross of Christ? But he believed, with all
of his school, that they were the work of Scribes and Pharisees, and
that one might still hold the pure old faith. He wrote a tract to shew
how the Church-fathers held it. "Our heresy," he said, "stands in every
prayer of the mass." He did not look at the question in a broad way as
one of abstract right or wrong; his personal needs supplied him with his
point of view. So long as he could freely teach Christ, he had no wish
to leave the Church. He united in the closest fellowship with
evangelical Christians at Nuremberg, at Basle, at Herrnhut. He sought to
build up within the Romish body a living brotherhood of the faith. But
he never busied himself with any save practical issues—he never seems to
have thought of the error bound up with the system. It may have been
partly the tendency of his mind, very much, no doubt, the tendency of
the time and the peculiar bias of his university. He saw that the
Protestants had a few faithful people, and so had the Catholics—he felt
that Jesus was all in all with the faithful of both. Yet, even making
large allowance, it is difficult to understand his position, to
sympathise with the extent to which his personal love and work for
Christ made him careless about all wider questions. There is still much
enigmatic, unexplained, perhaps unsatisfactory, in this part of his
history—much that the strength and habit of Protestant tradition prevent
us from realising. When he left the Romish Church, however, it was only
in name; he had left it thirty years before. "Since," he wrote in his
petition to the Consistory of Berlin, "through the persecution of blind
zealots, I have lost my public sphere of labour, and am a husbandman
without land, a shepherd without a flock, and yet feel myself called to
work as long as it is day, I beg the honourable Consistory, seeing that
my little boat has been driven upon the sands by the storm of
persecution, to help it out to the open sea—i.e., to procure me
opportunity and permission again to preach in public the Word of God.
For thirty years I have had the grace to proclaim the gospel, and,
though not outwardly in the Evangelical Church, have been always an
evangelical preacher. .... Since I have suffered so much from the
Catholic Consistory, I hope and beg that the Evangelical Consistory will
heal the wounds, and, like the Samaritan, pour into them oil and wine,
and treat with forbearance one who has been often smitten and sorely
hurt." There is no error to repent, no dogma to recant; that had been
done long ago. He pleads now with a frank dignity as a persecuted
preacher of Christ Jesus.

After the petition was presented there were many
tedious and vexing delays; after it was granted there were many vexing
forms. He had to go through the trials of a candidate. Notwithstanding
the friendly kindness and delicacy of Neander, it was a hard struggle
for his old man. Then there was difficulty about a church; and it was
not till two years afterwards, in the spring of 1829, that he was
installed as pastor of the Bohemian congregation in the Bethlehem.

Meanwhile he was not idle. The prayer-meetings of
Munich were re-established. Quiet evenings were spent in Christian
intercourse. The highest circles opened to receive him. He sat silent
and constrained if the conversation was not congenial. If any opening
led to Christian subjects he was warm, animated, and eager. He had a
horror of religious dissipation, and shrunk from the idle, fluent talk
on solemn subjects that prevails in religious circles. But if he noticed
any earnestness and real feeling, no one was readier to speak, most of
all on Christ in us. After brief, silent prayer, he would open the
Bible, read a chapter and explain it, dwelling sometimes on redemption
and the new birth, sometimes on the Christian walk and the fruits of the
Spirit.

Many were quickened; some were arrested; but ''the
good man dreaded the tea that followed the closing prayer, and that the
impression would vanish at the clatter of cups, and the busy gossip of
the day." Schleiermacher opened his church to him, where the most
select, brilliant, and intellectual audiences of the capital assembled.
It was characteristic of his large instinct that he discerned Gossner's
gifts, and rejoiced in them. No two types of mind, no two modes of
preaching, could well be more opposite : the one weaving philosophy into
the Christian system, and expanding Christian doctrine into a
philosophy,—the other abhorring everything but the bare cross of Christ;
the one overwhelmingly eloquent, imaginative, scholarly, ranging over
human thought,—the other with his homely, straightforward, unvarying
message about Jesus. Madame Schleiermacher found in this preaching what
she needed, what her husband had never given. He had no envy, he made no
change himself, he was only thankful that his wife was reached. Then the
Moravians gave Gossner their hall. The Louisenkirche echoed to his
message, and was crowded to the door. And when he ascended the pulpit of
Bethlehem, the people flocked to hear him. "Five years since," he wrote
to a friend on his installation, "I fell— rather was thrown—out of the
pulpit. How hard to climb to it once more ! Pulpit-stairs are perilous
for me to go up and grievous to go down." He was pastor there for
seventeen years. It became a living centre for the work of God in the
city. Church-extension, town-missions, the preaching of the Cross, took
their impulse from it. Circles of students assembled about him, whom he
urged, out of the fulness of his heart, to the Saviour of sinners. The
middle class and the artisans were the special sphere of his influence,
and the progress of Christian life in that direction is greatly owed to
him; but he was welcomed also in the royal household, and ministered to
the dying Princess William. And from this time ''Father Gossner " was a
dear and familiar name, spoken with reverence and affection among high
and low; as much honoured in the university as by the simple-minded
Christians of his pastorate ; more a part of Berlin than even its
Schelling or Neander; as much an acknowledged power in it as the
police-office or the king.

It was now that the work of his life began. He was in
his fifty-sixth year—truly a late starting, but he was singular in
everything. God had been educating him; and if the foundation was
tedious and deep, the building was a glorious temple of the Spirit. Few
men have had such a training; thirty years of conflict without and
within; a continued overthrow of his own plans ; the rending of every
attachment; persecution and applause; an endless tossing over a stormy
sea. No doubt it was needed; God's children are not tried for nought. He
who is the treasury of wisdom will not let the painful lessons of years
be thrown away; and if we see a man cut down before the gathering of the
fruit, can we pierce within the veil ? or can we count the fruit which
angels gather with unseen hands? But Gossner was to have yet thirty
years of service; and when he died, he was like a tree whose branches
bend, with heavy ripeness, to the very ground. Though not
congregational, the work with which he will always be associated sprang
out of his connexion with the Bethlehem Church. Janike, his predecessor,
had founded a mission school as early as 1800. Those he educated he
transferred to the English and Dutch societies. His students were the
first missionaries of the Church Missionary Society; he could count
among them afterwards such names as Rhenius, Nicolayson, and Gutzlaff.
Some years before his death, an independent society was formed under the
auspices of Neander and others, and which (as the Berlin Mission) has at
present fifteen labourers among the Koran-nas and Caffres in Southern
Africa. Gossner's name appears on the committee of this Society in 1831.
But ultra-Lutheran tendencies sprang up within it; ecclesiastical order
and scientific training were more regarded than personal piety; and in
1836 Gossner seceded. He never felt an interest in denominational
matters ; any stress upon the form or idea of a church seemed to him a
check upon the spiritual life, an outward thing which ought to be passed
by among Christians, and more nearly allied to bondage than to Christ.
Of scientific theology he had an instinctive dread, lest it should usurp
the place of the theology of the heart. "The scholastics," he said,
"never opened my eyes; if they did not make me sceptical, they left me
just where the false philosophy did." And to philosophy of any sort he
was not very patient. It represented the human to him; he wanted only
the divine. When Hegel's writing-desk was presented to the hospital, he
made a kitchen table of it, and professed it did better service than
before. "You would discern no more philosophy in it now," he said, "than
a few spots of ink." Nor could he yield to the necessity of learning
Ovid and Homer in order to preach Matthew and John to the islanders of
the South Seas. He was intensely and necessarily practical; by no means
opposed to learning and study, but not able to recognise their place in
the mission school, unless as much Latin as would carry one through the
Vulgate, and as much Greek as would make the New Testament readable in
the original. It was a needful protest, but it was an exaggeration of
the truth. Caeteris paribus, the man of cultivation will make a
better missionary than the ploughboy or mechanic. His knowledge of Homer
will help him when he has to fight with Siva and Krishnu; he is able to
turn everything to account; numberless resources are at his command; he
is not limited by the readiness of his mother wit, or the honest
straightforward dash of his zeal. He may find no immediate application
for his learning; its practical gain is to be sought in the tone and
grasp it gives to his mind ; in the stead it stands him at some
unforeseen crisis. But it was needful to assert that the engines of
human wisdom are powerless against the defences of the devil; that the
poor, unlettered man may preach Christ more faithfully than any; that
our machinery, however cunning and excellent, is often an encumbrance;
that the true teacher of a missionary is the Spirit of God; that the
ever-present power and help of God is the foundation of missionary
success. For some time Gossner remained quietly at his pastoral work,
confined, often for months, to his room, by severe pain. There, one day,
three or four young artisans came to him. They had been turned away from
the seminary as incapable. They burned, nevertheless, to go out among
the heathen; they sought his counsel and help. He refused them. They
besought him again and again. He prayed for direction, and took them.
They came—they were now ten or twelve—a few hours every week. ''What
shall I do with you? Where shall I send you?" he said, ''I don't know; I
can do nothing for you." "Only pray with us," they replied; ' that can
do no harm; if we can't go, we must even stay. But if it is God's work,
and His holy will that we go, He will open the door in His time." He
withdrew ashamed and strengthened; he felt that the mission was begun.
They were excellent workmen, and their masters allowed them two or three
afternoons in the week, free. For the rest, they came every evening when
their work was over, and learned what they could. Students and young
candidates rallied to his help. To teach an hour in the week for Gossner
was an honour. And many of them, smitten with the zeal of these humble
working men and the influence of the old man's spirit, went over later
to the mission-field. It was a singular picture that the pastorate
presented on these winter evenings ; the twelve earnest, patient men in
fustian, after their day's work, learning as they could the early Church
history, or reading in the Scriptures, or puzzling over Greek syntax
with the young, half-wondering student, or hearing recitals of the first
missionaries, and the story of old martyrs glowing freshly out of the
past, while the "father" himself moved about with a word of deep meaning
and counsel to each, or related his own struggles, and poured out the
most childlike and true prayers. A singular mission that began in a
workshop, without money or friends, or any prospect but faith in the
living God. But now a question rose about the future. Where were they to
go? Who was to send them? Gossner applied to England, and was
told that as many men as he could furnish would be sent to the Papuas of
New Holland. This difficulty over, another took its place. An ordained
missionary must go out with them, and Gossner had none. He sought his
usual counsel; prayed that God would give him the man he sought. In a
few days a young candi-nate offered himself. After Gossner had proved
him, he shewed him the place in his room where he had knelt down to ask
him from God. In 1838, eleven missionaries set sail for Australia. Next
year, a place was found for others in India. Mr Start was by birth a
Quaker, when eight years of age was received into the English Church
with his family, and as he grew up to manhood joined the Plymouth
Brethren. Possessed of ample means, he travelled to India to evangelise
the heathen, and when his wife died, he devoted his entire fortune to
mission work. He came twice to Europe for help. The second time Goss-ner's
missionaries were on the eve of embarkation; they were much talked of,
and he determined to visit Berlin, and inquire for himself. Mr Muller of
Bristol accompanied him. It would be curious to know something of the
meeting of two men so different from the rest of the world and so like
in the work of God, and who were both in their way testifying the same
truth—that a man can live by faith. All we are told is, that the
missionary candidates were tested during several weeks, and that, in
July 1838, twelve of them sailed with Mr Start for India. Five followed
in 1839, and in 1840, three more. This was the first of Gossner's Indian
mission. Mr Start bore the entire cost. The mission is at the junction
of the Gondak with the Ganges, in Berar, and in the locality of the
annual holy fair. The mission building had served as betting-room,
dancing-saloon, and hotel; the large ball-room was made a chapel. The
brethren were located through the district, and streams of blessing
flowed out over the dead heathendom. Afterwards, religious dissensions
sprang up; Mr Start's position to the missionaries was not well defined;
some joined the Church missions, some the Baptist; but, by Christian
prudence and forbearance, the danger passed away, and the mission stands
" as a bright light in the Church, to the rebuke and courage of many."
Meanwhile, other missions were undertaken, chiefly supported by himself.
1839 was marked by one to the Tubuai Islands in the South Seas. In
1840-41, twelve brethren went out to North America to labour among the
scattered Germans in the Western States; sixteen afterwards joined them.
In 1841 a station was occupied, under peculiarly favourable
circumstances, near Nagpore, in Central India; but within a year,
cholera swept off the six brethren, and the mission was not resumed. In
1842, five brethren established a station in Chatham Island, near New
Zealand; in 1844, four joined their earliest predecessors at New South
Wales ; 1845 will be memorable for the establishment of the mission
among the Kolis, at Chota-Nagpore. Every year, in fact, has its own
story to chronicle of missionaries equipped and stations opened—now it
is the Gold Coast, now it is Java or Macassar; at one time under shelter
of the Dutch, at another of the English; the Cape has its turn, and so
has New Guinea; wherever a people was living without God, there Gossner
was waiting to step in. Little wonder that he marvelled as he
wrote—"There are missions with zealous friends, hundreds of thousands of
pounds, institutions, auxiliaries, collections, subscription lists, and
yet they have not done so much as God has wrought through me, a poor,
weak shepherd-boy of Bethlehem."

It is difficult to realise that so many missions were
conceived, organised, controlled, and sustained by one man. Nor were
they either hasty experiments or struggling failures. If any were
relinquished, it was with the same deliberation and prayer by which they
were begun; and some have been blessed beyond all precedent, so that
their story is as marvellous as their founder's. The clearest testimony
to their character will be found by grouping them together with their
varied results up to the present time. The Australian never reaped any
fruit of its labour among the aborigines, sharing in this the fate of
all similar missions, save the Moravian; and recently the missionaries,
nineteen of whom are there and at Chatham Island, have turned their care
mostly to the scattered German population. The North American Mission,
which also is mostly colonial, is at present supplied by thirty
labourers, and from its very beginning has been made a means of great
good. The African has had missionaries at the Cape of Good Hope; twenty
missionaries are scattered through Java, Sumatra, Celebes, New Guinea,
and elsewhere, in circumstances of the greatest peril and denial, but
with less promise. In India there are sixteen, besides seventeen who
have joined other societies. Gossner had a prudent and manly horror of
reports and statistics as any gauge of success; he took it, that the
work is for the most part hidden, and is not to be annually dragged up
to the light, as children do with their first seeds. One day, an old
friend, as they sat together in his arbour asked him how many his
missionaries had baptized, and hinted that it was a matter of curiosity
among the brethren at the Pastoral Conference. "So, so," he replied,
"the gentlemen would like to know. But do not the gentlemen remember a
certain king who thought he would number his people, and what a sorry
ending it had?" Yet it may not be out of place to mention that he sent
in all 141 missionaries (including the wives of those who were married,
200), of whom 15 were regularly ordained ministers, [With few
exceptions, they were students of Halle, and scholars of Professor
Tholuck.] and 113 are still in active service; that, at the four
stations in Berar, many hundreds have been received into the church,
while the scholars number many thousands; and that among the Kolis a
work has been going on which exceeds in romantic interest and wonder any
story of modern missions, which would require a chapter for itself, and
of which only the bare facts can be told here: that in 1851 there were
no converts; in 1857 there were 50 villages, with 3000 Christians; and
in 1860 there are 300 villages, in each of which there are Christian
families—so mightily grew the Word of the Lord, and prevailed.

This is the outline of a solitary, often suffering
worker, whose labours did not begin till age is bidding other men to
cease. [He undertook his first mission at 65.]"One-in-hand,"somebody styled him;
"It's quite true," he said, laughing, when it came to his ears; ''and
yet old 'One-in-hand' carries more passengers than your Four." And he
was right. This unselfish, unconscious, unpretending clergyman, with his
few friends and quiet ways, and simplicity like a child's, was doing a
work at which the world must marvel. Call him Pietist, Methodist, what
you will, there is what he did, the patient, brave, honest effort.
Brilliant as other works of the century have been, humbly, self-sacrificingly,
faithfully as they have been wrought in science and elsewhere, there are
few worthy to be placed beside it. And as you look closer it grows all
the nobler, it is invested with a kind of grandeur, for his missionary
income never exceeded £1000. It is true that he was at no office
expense, that, as he merrily said, he was inspector, director,
secretary, packhorse, all in one. It is true that, as most of the
missionaries were artisans, they were able to do something for their own
support; that brother D------does not think it derogatory to mend
watches, nor brother G------ to paint a room, that brother S------can
turn an honest penny at job-printing, and brother B------ make
lichtbilder as delicately as they do in Berlin itself; but any one
who knows the scanty time the missionary must afford to work like this,
the loss of broken hours, the difference in the value of money, will
conceive that the help would not be very great. It is further true that
many of those sent out have been either in connexion with other
missionary societies, or have afterwards joined them. But when it is
remembered that, with few exceptions, the outfit and travelling expenses
of the missionaries fell upon Gossner, and that there were never less
than twenty dependent on him for support, and against that is set his
poor £1000 a-year, and that itself not collected in any ordinary and
certain way, but as people were moved to give, it will be seen that much
remains unexplained and, indeed, incredible to our common notions. A
clear head and a wise heart, energy, perseverance, system, economy,
knowledge of character, go a good way—and he had them in a remarkable
degree—for the true worker must have working gifts. No one will feel
that this is a solution; since besides the maintenance of the
missionaries— and it is their own testimony that none of them ever came
to want, but if they suffered from anything it was from
superfluity—there were critical periods of the mission history; there
were dissensions that might have broken up the stations; there were
questions to be decided in the pastor's study that concerned the welfare
of God's kingdom in Java and Nagpore; there was a unity of thought and
action to be maintained among a hundred men at the most opposite points,
and, perhaps, of the most opposite opinions; an unbroken connexion to be
kept by letters with every settlement; the mission paper had to be
edited; the training school at home to be diligently watched; nay, the
very income itself was uncertain, for it was left to the private
thoughts of Christian brethren. Whose head would not be puzzled, if left
to its own wit, in such a tangle? What nicely-balanced
calculations would not be often rudely overturned? What peculiar
doctrine of chances would cover with a uniform and calculable success
the venture of twenty years? What known human power can determine that
when a man receives £20 he will be kept as comfortably as if he had
£100? Yet push forward such questions and the world will set busily to
answer them; it does not believe in our day that there is anything which
it cannot do; it must account for all phenomena upon its own principles.
It is a monstrously clever world. Steam and telegraph and photography,
and planets discovered before they are seen, Great Easterns, and St
Lawrence Bridges are very fair credentials. Victor Hugo may be right in
adding balloons, though he will not be forgiven for making them the
world's millennium, and therefore its limit. But there is a kingdom into
which none enter but children, in which the children play with infinite
forces, where the child's little finger becomes stronger than the
world's giant; a wide kingdom, where the world exists only by sufferance
to which the world's laws and developments are for ever subjected; in
which the world lies like a foolish, wilful dream in the solid truth of
the day. Gossner had been brought into that kingdom ; these questions
were nothing to him, it was enough that he could kneel down and pray.
Standing by his open grave, one said of him, and it was not
hyperbole—"He prayed up the walls of an hospital and the hearts of the
nurses; he prayed mission-stations into being, and missionaries into
faith; he prayed open the hearts of the rich, and gold from the most
distant lands." And as for his sermons, the power of the words did not
lie so much in the thoughts or in the art of the preacher, as in prayer.
Prayer was his atmosphere ; he could not live without it. So soon as he
came to Berlin, he gathered a few round him for prayer. They continued
in prayer while he lived. He could not be present where it was excluded.
The Bible Society had determined to open its committee meetings with
silent prayer; he protested, and the protest shewed how deeply his heart
was sunk in the heart of Christ. "A Bible Society that does not begin
with prayer is to my mind a synagoga pro-Janorum. ... I do not
despise a short, silent prayer, but it is too little at a Bible Society,
and no more than if a nurse said to a child, Make a courtesy, and it
made it, and that was all. . . . If I went to the meeting and sought
prayer, and it was forbidden, I would take my hat and stick and run out
as if a mad dog had bitten me. ... If I could raise the dead, I would go
to Wittenberg and call Luther out of his grave, and Spener, and Arndt,
and Andrea, and bring them to the Bible Society at Berlin, and let them
decide." That was the spirit in which he undertook the mission ; that
was the guidance by which it was ruled; and whatever letters, or
questions, or threatenings, or difficulties, whatever private or public
sorrows reached him from any quarter of the mission-field, they were
directly put before God. " Here I sit," he would say, "in my little
room; I cannot go here and there to arrange and order everything; and if
I could, who knows if it would be well done ? but the Lord is there, who
knows and can do everything, and I give it all over to Him, and beg Him
to direct it all, and order it after His holy will; and then my heart is
light and joyful, and I believe and trust Him that He will carry it all
nobly out." He dedicated to this intercourse the latter part of his
life; retiring not only from public interests, but from his
acquaintances, and incurring the charge of being unsocial and unloving.
And he was so guided by the hand of God, and his prayers were so
answered, that the universal feeling of the missionaries was, "Who will
now lift up his hands to Heaven in prayer for the scattered children?"
And so, almost in prayer he died; not, however, for the missions alone.

When he came to Berlin there were no hospitals, there
was no visiting of the poor, no inner life stirring in the
Church. Germany was just recovering from the paralysis of dead, coarse
unbelief, and the materialism of a very false philosophy. For years
after he was a rallying-point for the scattered, struggling, feeble, and
despised piety. Home missions occupied his mind. He established a
society for visiting the sick. It was confined to men.

The women begged him to form and direct one for them.
The necessity of an hospital soon became manifest; and in 1837 a house
for forty was erected, and in 1838 enlarged for twenty more. Thirteen
deaconesses remain in the hospital; as need arises, some are draughted
elsewhere, and new candidates supply their place. The training is
intensely Christian; the organisation just as simple. Many of the
deaconesses have gone to heathen mission-stations. In all, 160 have
passed through it, and 7000 sick been received. The Elizabeth Hospital
was a favourite haunt of Goss-ner's. As in the mission, he was
factotum; chaplain, director, friend. Early on the Sunday morning
his figure might be seen rapidly advancing up Potsdam Street till it
vanished in the hospital doorway. He was on his way to hold a brief
lecture for the inmates able to attend. The room used as a chapel would
hold about fifty; it was always crowded. He sat in a low pulpit at the
upper end, a genial-looking, lively old man. His white hair peeped out
behind under the little black skull-cap; his eyes (I saw him last five
years ago) still shot keen, searching glances from below the massive,
close-knit brows; he had the high cheek-bones of the country, as high as
Luther's, but in proportion to a longer face; a sweet, gentle expression
played about his mouth; the features altogether were prominent, seamed
with deep lines, almost rugged. His exposition was simple, naive,
personal. The homeliest Bavarian stories would be dropped in to
illustrate it. The Scripture was pictured from the life of the present
day. If he found the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judah, he
could not help bringing him into the Thier-Garten of Berlin, and drawing
the doctors of the law and the soldiers and students out to him through
the Brandenburg gate. Gleams of the playfullest humour lighted up the
most commonplace truths and views; and, after an hour of close personal
conversation, he would cease. His infant-schools occupied some of his
time; the Sunday evenings were given up to visits from young men, many
of whom could date their faith and peace from the words he spoke in
those quiet hours. He wrote much to the very last. At seventy he learned
English, and translated some of Ryle's tracts when he was upwards of
eighty. His writings, at present numbering forty-six, occupy a separate
Book and Tract Society; and many volumes of posthumous papers are
announced. Those already published possess an unusual popularity, some
having run through annual or semiannual editions for many years. Up till
the spring of 1858 he corrected proofs and continued his correspondence.
The summer previous he was still able to train his vines. By the end of
March he had fought the good fight and finished the course —a young old
man of eighty-five. He had seen the stately hospital Bethanien spring up
in the Koppnicker fields; he had seen new churches, new preachers,
almost a new, and that the very oldest, gospel; he had seen the network
of the Inner Mission covering the great cities, religious feeling
penetrating everywhere, throwing up its growths on the surface of every
society. He had lived through the great religious crises of modern times
— through Illuminism, Rationalism, Ecclesiasticism—through the throes of
the new life and the growth of the rebaptized Church— through a rare
epoch of thought, and science, and progress. They had touched him in
turn, but only as the ripple of distant storms runs round a solitary
rock. His life was single—the life of a heart, and went out from its own
centre—the life of an Abraham, going out and knowing not whither,
following the word of the Lord—the life of faith, from which the events
of the world for the time being fall back into shadow, supreme in its
own interest and Divine companionship. By faith he preached Christ
crucified in the Church of Rome; by faith he resigned his cure in
Dirlewang rather than give up one jot of the truth; by faith he lived at
Munich, and spread the good news of the kingdom; by faith he went to
Petersburg; by faith he was led to Berlin; by faith he sustained the
hearts of one hundred missionaries, and bore the burden of twenty
stations, and built an hospital, and wrote Jesus upon thousands of
lives. By faith—by prayer—that is his teaching. He was long in the
school, learning and unlearning; it was the time of an ordinary life.
But he left it ready for his calling; and such a teacher never dies. The
tediousness of pupilage is no waste when the workman needeth not to be
ashamed. From humble little Hausea and the unnoticed struggles of a
country priest, to the '' Father Gossner" of a reverent religious
Germany; from Fen-neberg's little parlour and the simple talk of the
parish, to the furthest ends of heathendom, and a name that is lovingly
spoken on every continent of the globe, is a mighty stride. Neither
brilliant talents nor the tide of fortune helped him. Whoever seeks the
way to it, wall find it to be that plain, old-fashioned one of faith and
prayer. [For many details in the above sketch the writer acknowledges
his obligations to the interesting "Biogra-phische Skizze," by Gossner's
worthy successor, Dr Prochnow. English readers will be glad to learn
that Dr Prochnow is preparing an edition of his little work for this
country, and is only delayed by the increasing richness of his
materials.]

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